A Minor Detail

If we have the determination to reduce the roughly 30,000 people in this country who are shot each year by firearms, to reduce that to zero, we can do it…it is within our ability to do that. We just have to adopt the registration requirement that has been so successful in Canada.
– Buford Scott.

I’m not going to address the ludicrous claim that we can reduce gun violence by any significant amount (let alone to zero) by registration. That’s just absurd.
Rather, I’m going to focus on part of his first sentence:

…people in this country who are shot by firearms…

Maybe I’m just being pedantic, but I’ve never heard of anyone being shot by a firearm. Rather, I’ve heard of people being shot by other people with firearms.
The Brady Campaign has a flyer along these lines where they state that “In 2004, guns murdered…11,344 [people] in the United States.” For the sake of the exercise, I’m not going to dispute the numbers, but I suspect that the guns alone didn’t do the murdering…rather, a person used a gun as a means of murdering someone else.
Last time I checked, guns are inanimate objects without any will of their own.
Indeed, Assault Weapon Watch has been closely monitoring an AR-15 for over four years, and it has yet to move, speak, dance, or commit acts of violent crime. It’s just quietly sat there for four years in the corner.
Perhaps it’s a clever ruse on the rifle’s part? Is it behaving as such simply to serve as a decoy, so we won’t pay attention to other guns going out and committing crimes on their own? Who knows?